Timothy West and Samuel West play a father and his sons in Caryl Churchill's
play that is as as emotionally upsetting as it is intellectually and morally
profound. Rating: * * * *

Caryl Churchill’s play lasts less than an hour but packs in more emotion, ideas, and disconcerting strangeness, than many dramatists manage in half a dozen dramas.

First staged at the Royal Court in 2002, A Number now receives a superb revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory that adds a further twist. This is a play about a father and his sons and they are played here by Timothy West and his own son, Samuel.

In the first scene we meet Bernard (35) who has always believed he is a much loved only child. However he has just discovered he has as many as twenty cloned brothers. Still worse, he may not even be the original from whom all the others were copied. He goes to his father, upset and confused, and his father insists that Bernard is his original, beloved son and the others were created without his knowledge or permission by the doctor involved. He even envisages a lucrative legal action that could make them as much as £5 million.

But the father, Salter, isn’t telling the truth. In the next scene he is confronted by another Bernard (40) five years older than the one we met before, and very different in character. The younger Bernard was emotional, needy, loving. The older one is a vicious, possibly psychopathic thug. But then it transpires that his father treated him terribly in his childhood, and had him placed in care at the age of four, cloning a new version, whom he looked after much better. At the end we also meet a third of his many cloned sons.

Out of a sci-fi scenario which could one day become a real-life possibility, Churchill creates a play that is as emotionally upsetting as it is intellectually and morally profound. But A Number, despite its darkness and echoes of Cain and Abel, is also an unexpectedly optimistic work.

Tackling the nature-versus-nurture debate head-on, the dramatist concludes that human beings aren’t just the sum of their genetic parts, and that we aren’t preordained to assume a particular personality and mode of behaviour.

Churchill’s spare, confrontational dialogue has a similar power and precision to Pinter at his best, and there isn’t an ounce of surplus fat on the piece. Timothy West plays the father with a mixture of furtive unease, gnawing guilt and a deeply moving vulnerability, both physical and emotional. Meanwhile Samuel West differentiates the three sons with high-definition panache. This is a play, and a production, worth 50 minutes of anyone’s time.